Asia, explained.
US President Donald Trump and China's President Xi Jinping arrive for talks at the Gimhae Air Base in Busan on 30 October 2025 (Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/Getty)
Two factors are forcing a re-think: Trump's diplomacy, and the realisation that China's growth cannot be halted.
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Washington’s China consensus is breakingWashington’s China consensus is breaking
US discourse on China policy is slowly but decidedly expanding on account of two factors: the increased influence of President Donald Trump in formulating it, and a growing recognition among observers, including current and former senior government officials, that the United States can only do so much to slow China’s technological progress and organise a counterbalancing coalition.
The Overton window on US policy towards China is expanding. The bad news is that one can all too easily imagine how it could close.
There is an opening, then, to press for a reorientation of US policy away from a misguided objective of victory and towards the inescapable imperative of cohabitation.
According to a common narrative, the second Trump administration is unwinding the alleged “consensus” on China policy that the first one introduced — beginning with the White House’s December 2017 National Security Strategy (NSS) and culminating with a November 2020 report by the State Department, The Elements of the China Challenge. This seeming dissonance is easier to resolve when one appreciates that Trump himself does not subscribe to the foundational view of some past advisors: that competition between the United States and China is zero-sum, ideological, and existential, rooted in Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s determination to ensure that China regains a central position in the international order.
During his first term, Trump permitted or ignored more confrontational actions by his deputies so long as he believed this would not undermine his principal agenda: securing a trade deal with Xi (the two leaders’ talks culminated in a “phase one” agreement in January 2020).
Trump embraces a narrow conception of competition, with few persistent grievances beyond the size of China’s trade surplus and its export of fentanyl precursors. He seems to regard Xi not as an imperial autocrat but as a business rival, one with whom he can build an enduring rapport and place bilateral ties on a more stable footing.
Indeed, Trump's respect for Xi seems to have increased over the course of the trade standoff that has dominated US-China relations since he launched his “Liberation Day” tariff offensive in early April. Before they met in Busan at the end of October, Trump declared that the “G2” would be convening, seemingly doing what none of his predecessors thought — or needed — to countenance: accepting Beijing’s status as a peer to Washington.
Trump provides a degree of political cover for lawmakers who seek more regular, substantive dialogues with top China.
The new NSS reflects that conclusion, assessing that the US-China relationship “has transformed into one between near-peers.” Unlike the first Trump administration’s NSS, though, which spotlighted “great-power competition” with China and Russia, and the Biden administration’s NSS, which declared that China is “the only competitor with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the...power to do it,” the latest strategic guidance deprioritises Beijing’s resurgence, instead giving top billing to threats that emanate from within the Western Hemisphere.
While such stances place Trump squarely at odds with most Republican members of Congress, who view China as America’s foremost adversary, those lawmakers understand that their political fortunes would plummet were they to criticise him publicly.
And because he is invested in leader-level diplomacy with Xi, he provides a degree of political cover for lawmakers who seek more regular, substantive dialogues with top Chinese interlocutors. It is encouraging that four members of the House of Representatives, including a Republican, Michael Baumgartner of Washington State, visited China in September (the first such delegation since 2019) and expressed the hope that their initiative would “lead to more opportunities for members of Congress to engage in meaningful conversations with senior Chinese government officials.”
The leader of the delegation, Democrat Adam Smith, also from Washington State, has argued that “China is going to exist. [The United States is] going to exist.” It might seem self-evident to conclude, as Smith does, that Beijing will prove an enduring power, and that Washington will have to recalibrate its mindset accordingly. Yet esteemed observers still feel compelled to rebut the assessment that China’s comprehensive national power has peaked or will soon plateau.
That China confronts mounting structural challenges at home and an increasingly contested environment abroad is indisputable. Its accelerating military modernisation, its growing diplomatic sway — especially across the developing world — and, most importantly, its burgeoning economic heft all suggest, however, that its weight in international affairs is increasing.
One sometimes hears that, were the United States to coordinate more closely with allies and partners, Washington could “win” its competition with Beijing.
China has demonstrated a heightened capacity not only to adapt to US sanctions, tariffs, and export controls, but also, with little exertion, to inflict damage across many US industries, particularly thanks to its dominance in producing and processing rare earths, which are indispensable to America’s automotive sector and defence industrial base. Meaningfully diversifying away from China on those fronts will likely be a decades-long undertaking, as will reducing reliance on its pharmaceuticals.
On the flip side, the limits of America’s economic leverage are becoming more apparent. Former US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo has noted that while US officials once “thought they were going to hobble Huawei,” a major Chinese telecommunications company, it is “stronger than ever, making incredible chips.” Scholars Jennifer Lind and Michael Mastanduno conclude that “not only are export controls failing to hold China back, they might actually be accelerating Chinese innovation through the scarcity they impose” (authors' emphasis).
One sometimes hears that, were the United States to coordinate more closely with allies and partners to form a bloc whose defence spending and economic output would be several times larger than China’s, Washington could “win” its competition with Beijing. The mathematical logic of this conclusion, though, lags its practical likelihood. Many of those countries, after all, aim to de-risk not only from a more assertive Beijing but also from a more unreliable Washington, where the America First wing of the Republican Party could well retake power periodically and therefore exert a substantial influence over US foreign policy indefinitely.
There are at least two other indicators that the space for a fresh conversation on China policy may be expanding. First, a small but growing body of scholarship challenges the widespread presumption that China is immutably set on replacing the United States as the world’s preeminent power and establishing a Sinocentric order.
China does not want to be subordinate to the United States, but it recognises that either an armed conflict or a protracted struggle with the world’s preeminent power could derail its present trajectory. It wants to modify aspects of the present order, sometimes to America’s detriment — for example, by working to gain more traction for authoritarian approaches to economic development and technological standard-setting. But China is also significantly invested in that order, where it wields enormous influence by virtue of its integration within institutions such as the United Nations, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund.
Second, contrary to the erstwhile hope among some US commentators that China’s resurgence would ease political polarisation among Americans, a recent survey by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs finds that “Republicans and Democrats now hold distinctly different views on a range of China-related questions.” Thus, instead of bringing Americans together in common cause, the China challenge might prove to be another vector and accelerant of that polarisation.
The good news, then, is that the Overton window on US policy towards China is expanding. The bad news is that one can all too easily imagine how it could close.
Inertia could prevail. Washington’s discourse remains more focused on achieving an unlikely victory over Beijing — rendered even unlikelier given that there is no agreement on what such an outcome would entail in practice — than on grappling with competitive coexistence. Trump’s successor could hold that the United States is losing a “new Cold War” and must therefore move aggressively and globally restore its competitive footing.
Alternatively, China could overplay its hand, as it did when it pursued its campaign of “Wolf Warrior” diplomacy during the height of the coronavirus pandemic. Were Xi to authorise a quarantine or blockade of Taiwan, Trump — whatever he might say or indicate in advance — would face enormous pressure to respond, lest domestic political opponents and US allies and partners depict him as weak. Alternatively, were China to employ new forms of economic leverage that harm US consumers and companies, Trump might feel personally slighted and empower officials in his administration who want to decouple the US and Chinese economies.
Trump rightly seeks a sustained dialogue with Xi, and he appears to have instructed top advisors to prioritise calm in bilateral ties. US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said in a keynote address at this month’s Reagan National Defense Forum that Trump seeks “a stable peace, fair trade, and respectful relations.” Days earlier, US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said that “the decision right now is…to have stability in this relationship.”
Trump’s execution, however, has been misguided. His trade gambit has imbued Xi with greater confidence, and his sustained economic attacks and diplomatic broadsides against US allies and partners erode trust in Washington. And while Trump has helped create room for a new, more nuanced, construct to guide China policy, he himself has neither supplied one nor evinced an interest in doing so. This paradigmatic vacuum risks incentivising China to behave more coercively, should Beijing conclude that Washington would be indifferent. There is an opportunity and an imperative to fill it.
About the author
Ali Wyne
Ali Wyne is the senior research and advocacy advisor for U.
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